Category Archives: Poems

Damage – Poem

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Damage

One summer I walked with a limp
because I wanted to be a cripple,
wanted a flaw to mar the appearance
of perfection we created on vacation,
charging from diversion
to diversion. All I saw
were the backs of their heads,
my mother and her frosted hair,
my father’s white socks
and the tubby ass of my sister
in her terrycloth rainbow romper
always smelling of crotch and hairspray
when she tossed it off at night
into a corner of the Hotel 6
where the silence followed us to Florida
from our home, the home
we never left behind, the home
that trailed us through Adventure Island
and the Congo River Ride.
That was the summer I wished
for cancer, for a tumor that couldn’t be
removed, a mass so thick and palpable
the damage could not be denied, forcing
an amputation, its replacement so false
and hollow my faulty body would thunder
through botanical garden trails, and shatter
the leafy chatter of our family’s last resort.

Baggage – Poem

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Baggage

I have written a thousand poems
to the emptinesses I’ve left

behind, simple as sockrolls
tucked in haversack flap pockets, compact

as a roll of quarters tumbling
in an unfilled suitcase. I would no more

read them to you than I would answer
the ads on back pages of

the foreign city hotel foyer newspapers I read
alone in pallid, impersonal rooms.

Several Ways of Seeing Gender – New Poem

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A work in progress. Feel free to make suggestions (it’s clear to me; not sure it is to anyone else). As always, this post could self-destruct at any time if the poet suffers a severe self-doubt meltdown.

Several Ways of Seeing Gender

1.
A bra strap
misaligned
with the shoulders
of her sundress, the band
black & frayed.

Strained as a noose
fastened to steel girders
on a bridge. In the pew
behind her he thinks
this is the best
she could do?

2.
Oh what he
could do with the dress

freshly pressed
the stockings & shoes
the stance the sass
in the step well-practiced
and kept
in the closet.

3.
He
does not want
to be she

although it would be
easier, although
the H, glottal
fricative
of escape, indicates
dependency
on context, on
environment

& while the sh
of her gender
is also
voiceless, it requires

tension, hints
at secret or shame.
But also

softness. Like silk
slipped past the cleft
of an open drawer.

It’s only
a dress. It’s only
a letter. Cosmetic.
This isn’t hard
to understand.

4.
My son is home from school
& I have to play
by the rules, my fingertips
dry & stubby as the butt
of an old cigar, the red tips
hidden & stored like the bodies
of beetles on display. Clicky
as summer cicadas.

5.
The feminine
for now
only comes out
in pictures, too glamorous
anyway
for church
on Sunday.

It isn’t just gender
that gets in the way,
it’s preference. Taste.

Anyone
who desires elegance nowadays
laments.

6.
I am
this dress
& those
shoes

that pose
in that photo
the lighting
just so
the drape & slit
of skirt against thigh –

she says it isn’t fair
when a man
has better legs
than a woman

7.
& oh what he
could do if he
were she. He does not want
to be she

but he would do
the best she/he could do
if he could wear that dress
to church one Sunday.

Essence – Poem

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Essence

When she brought home little samples
of cologne, wisps of scent
in slender tubes, he tested them
brutally, slapping the wet notes
against his neck like any novice
applies perfume, without respect
for the delicate molecules,
rubbing his wrists together
as if trying to start a fire
with his skin, or worse,
spraying the air
in front of him before walking through
it like a curtain, as if stage-
frightened by that most sensual
of senses, that reminder
of his mother’s lipstick
or an earthy garden
moistened by rain. Once
they were all drained,
he resurrected an old vial
from a cabinet beneath
the bathroom sink, the bottle-dust
thick as velvet against his fingers,
its fragrance potent
with time, its smell
in the soft slope of his neck
like a hallway in a high school
building long condemned, or sex
in a car.

Like California – Poem

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The Ning community This Life Lived is dedicated through weekly practice assignments to heightening awareness and attention. In searching for poems to fit both This Life Lived and mareymercy’s current topic of attention, I came across this one from my manuscript:

Like California

According to reports, vast areas of the Golden State
are sinking, grating against another age, worrying a world
already weary with fault and fracture.

Once on a day’s hike off Skyline Boulevard I felt it
happening, when I ventured past the designated trail
onto unprotected acres, and a snake confronted me

from a deep ridge in the high weeds, rattling
like a rusty cog choking into motion. For a moment
I was so still I disappeared, willed into nonexistence.

It was not unpleasant, or unfamiliar, as if our meeting
were prearranged, its conclusion already known,
and although I believed I would be set free, something within

began unsettling, as if parts of me would never reappear,
small certainties returned to earth like scattered stones –
just like California, shifting back into the sea, one

sacrifice at a time, each release a small restructuring,
simple as a shell’s ear, dissolving into all our fatal histories,
our gentle rumbling towards destruction.

-originally published in Albatross Magazine

Native Tongue – New Poem

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This is a new one. If I decide I don’t like it I’ll take it down, so read it quickly, ’cause I do that a LOT. And if you like it let me know – it motivates me to leave it up.

Native Tongue

The blood I can feel
each morning, slow as sap
through the skin & tissue.

Untapped. Maybe I need
medication, it’s probably hormones
someone will say.

It’s some-odd years
of the same. Not the ones
already lived, it’s what is

to come. I regret
what is left. No man ever learned

his lesson from me. My lips
were never red. My native tongue not
his first language. His blood

so blue it showed through
on his face & fingers.

Imprint – Poem

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Imprint

I didn’t want to touch the fawn I found
nestled next to her dead mother
on the dirtroad shoulder, went
for my cell phone instead to call
the local shelter. I knew enough
of human touch contaminating
nature, how just my voice could generate
enough stress to kill. While waiting
for the rescue truck to come I kept
my distance, recalling stories I’d heard
about encounters with the wild
that made people feel small and insignificant,
but I didn’t feel small, I felt enormous,
as if my fingers were the prongs of pitchforks,
my breath the tremor of jackhammers.
After the workers came and carried her
away, I wandered back to the yellow car
I’ve loved one-sidedly for years, and together
we tumbled home like a great wrecking ball
careening towards another unsuspecting destination.

Weekly prompt for We Write Poems

Waiting for Bolivar Ferry – Poem

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Waiting For Bolivar Ferry

We wait our turn
on a weekend
when tourists and teens
converge
on the peninsula
to stretch their skin
in the sun: engines off,
windows down,
radios up,
as if the beat
proclaims
some inner rhythm
of parched hearts.

A sheen of boys
begins to volley
for attention, girls
in open truckbeds
cake makeup,
spray hair
already starched
with heat.

The shoreline
brings the sleaze
out of everyone,
the steam
that shimmies up
from the concrete,
the stick, the sweat,
the hidden grit
that slicks
to the surface.

We are waiting
for Bolivar Ferry.

When it docks
we’ll all pull forward
in tight metal rows
onto the boat
that will slick us
like plastic
six-pack scrap
across the sea.

Asking the Water – Poem

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Asking the Water

I am sitting on the concrete steps that file down into rocks at the jetties and fade into sand. He does not know me, stands at my back, to my right, as I watch the ocean blind the sky with its own light, watch the skin of sea split open like wound, the white-edged lip of broken water lean towards land, then draw back. The shore

is incidental. Or maybe I am, or maybe it is he, standing behind me, saying: If there’s anything I can do, words that fade like something wet slipped into dryness. He knows how that sentence ends, everyone does, touches my shoulder instead, turns to walk back up salt-dusted stairs to the yellow car that brought us here, the car that will take us back,

and water whispers at my feet, tangling between rocks and shells, the tidal hush of secrets.